I run a shopify store that distributes parts from the US and also from overseas. The different manufacturers we use all have different shipping rates that vary both with weight and location. For instance, something of the same weight but from a different company costs a different amount and some items that are heavier are actually cheaper to send than lighter products.. Simply using a weight based algorithm for shipping can be faulty because if the weight of an order adds up to a heavier amount, the shipping for that order may actually become cheaper because the part in mind for that weight is assumed.. What I really need is the sum of the various vendor shipping costs. I also have trouble giving overseas quotes because again, our manufacturers are located in different places and some of them are closer/cheaper than others.

I'm not sure this post is clear enough but needed to get this discussion started in some form to start making progress. I'm happy to use a third party app if there's one out there and I'm also happy to find an expert that would be willing to assist me personally. Anything helps.

Great question, shipping costs, and workflows are a very important factor to get right. From your post, I'm thinking a shipping app and adding Carrier Calculated Shipping (CSS) is the best way forward for you.

If you are on the Advanced Shopify Plan or higher, then you can use your carrier account credentials to display calculated rates (CSS) at checkout. If you are based in the USA or Canada then you could look into using Shopify Shipping for this. With calculated shipping, you won't have to manually enter estimated flat rates for all the places you ship, and you'll always charge the right amount for shipping. Calculated shipping is free and available on all plans for all merchants using USPS and Canada Post rates at checkout. The content team at Shopify wrote a blog post going into more detail about this which you can read here. If you aren't based in the UK or Canada you can still add CSS which comes for free if you are on the Advanced plan or higher (and if you pay for your plan annually), there is a $20 monthly cost if you are on the Lite, Basic Shopify or Shopify plan. Shopify also has a helpful guide with more information on CSS which you can see here.

There are also some apps you can use to go alongside CSS to help. The apps connect with CSS and can give you custom settings within your shipping to take it to another level. Let's take a look at some of these apps below:

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Nick,Thank you for getting back to me. Your response is helpful for a portion ofthe issue. However, I have vendors for my store located in different partsof the world. One of which is in Germany and another in the United States.Now if I get everything delivered to me from those two then ship from mylocation, those apps work. However, because these items are rather heavy,shipping one item twice easily sinks profit. So, what I do is drop shipitems from my vendors and also ship some of my personally manufactureditems.When a client buys multiple items, some of which from different vendors, Ihave no way of summing the shipping costs.This is where it gets tricky. Because the cost to ship from each vendorvaries and does not necessarily correlate, I can not simply charge aspecific amount to any given client based on weight unless they order allparts from the same vendor or me. What I have to do is charge shipping foreach group of parts from their designated vendor and then sum the shippingfor each vendor in the order. This is done easiest by making an invoice andadding everything together. However, I would like the process to beautomated.So, I got in touch with some of your shopify support buddies after makingthe post and after an hour of diving into what my true biggest concern was,we were able to find the Advanced Shipping Manager App. Unfortunately, itcosts around $80 a month but it is a perfect resource when dealing withmultiple location drop shipping. I was very happy to find there was asolution now I am just debating swallowing the cost at this time. Coulddefinitely be beneficial in the future and would allow my complex weightbased shipping algorithm to be much cleaner with more freedom to categorizeeach item in groups by vendor and then by weight as a subcategory.Again, thank you for your response, wanted to share the rest of the issueand solution we found so it may help others with the same tricky situation.Cheers

If you're looking at a multi-vendor setup, Intuitive Shipping has that exact option at the ready. You are able to create a scenario that applies the precise cost from each supplier, and add those costs together, so that the customer only sees the final cost of shipping. You can calculate based any method you would like, and that way you only need to charge what your suppliers would charge. Hope this helps!

Thank you for sharing replying and sharing this feedback with more context @jacwagn.

I understand the app has a cost to it and isn't the most ideal solution because of that. What I will do is send this to our team as a feature request on your behalf. Feedback such as this from store owners such as yourself is invaluable. Thanks so much again.

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Jack, since you are already drop shipping some products, i may have a solution for you. You can separate multiple ship from locations for each drop shipper in the Multi Carrier Shipping label app and then define rules such that would allow you to define shipping service for a particular product. So if Vendor A sells product 'kite', then you can define a rule such that FedEx overnight is displayed when 'kite' comes to the cart. If any other product comes up, then that will trigger another rule of another vendor. When both kinds of products are there in cart, then currently there is no solution for it. However, you can get in touch with the team who can definitely come out with a use case to add the rates and show at checkout.